Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Read Online Free PDF

part. Non-actors, inspired by Joan Littlewood, and given just enough of a framing structure by Platts-Mills, enacted a fable of place, shot in the wake of Italian neo-realism and the mood of British Free Cinema. The way Oxbridge directors, living vicariously, explored aspects of proletarian life, boys’ clubs, funfairs, bikers’ cafés, the seaside. Platts-Mills was the son of the barrister who defended Ronnie Kray at the 1969 trial in which he received a guilty verdict and a life sentence, with the recommendation that he serve ‘not less than thirty years’.
    Viewing Bronco Bullfrog while working alongside the rail yards where a fictitious robbery occurs was a disorientating experience. The film was produced by Andrew St John, a friend of Renchi Bicknell, and the man who set up Mari’s Girls , Renchi’s abortive ballet short. The editor was Jonathan Gili, an associate of John Betjeman. And in later years a customer for my used-book catalogues. Beyond his involvement with Betjeman’s topographic excursions, Gili designed the illustrated bear story Archie and the Strict Baptists. Philida Gili, whose drawings accompany the Betjeman text, was Jonathan’s wife and the daughter of the celebrated engraver Reynolds Stone. It struck me that the credits for Bronco Bullfrog , this modest Stratford story, shot at the optimum moment of social transformation, with disenchanted kids breaking away from the limited expectations and timid conventions of their parents, represented an honourable form of cultural tourism. The modest budget of £18,000 was enough, even then, to buy two or three terraced houses in the area, or a large property, with established garden, on a Victorian square in Hackney. The crew were West Londoners, while the cast, or most of them, came from the streets in which the film was set. The entire episode, like much that followed, was an invasion, a raid on exoticism. East London was a tribal, sexualized wilderness. The docks were dying, but you could smell the river.
    Cinema, like rock music, was a way for connected public-school boys to slipstream the energies of a romanticized underclass. The process of colonization went back to the post-war landscape of ruins, when London thrillers exploited bombed docks, rubbled terraces, street markets and rail yards. Among the jobbing repertory company of English gargoyles, you might find Dirk Bogarde as a quiveringly neurotic cosh boy, slumming spivs with strangulated RADA elocution, and teenage psychopaths impersonated by Dickie Attenborough. The movies paralleled, or anticipated, regeneration packages. If an area was striking enough in its dereliction to work as a film set, it was ripe for development. The Barney Platts-Mills expedition to Stratford, for all its virtues, was a signifier of coming land piracy. The arrival of our small troop of counterculturalists at Chobham Farm represented the same process in a different form. I was not there because I wanted to lose myself in a George Gissing abdication of status and identity. The landscape seduced me, it was an unwritten nowhere in which to launch a lifelong journal. My workmates were not heroic presences, trapped by economic pressure in degraded wage slavery, they were characters who might or might not turn up in a future fiction. Fortunately, the typed blue sheets, bound with twine, on which I kept a record of that winter’s work, have been lost. I can recover the diary film of the yards, bruised light, burning railway carriages, autumn sunrises, but the emotional formulae of the time, stark language seizures, have vanished into the attic jumble where everything has an equal value and nothing can be located on demand.
    The double-barrelled film-makers of the Platts-Mills era ( Bronco Bullfrog was photographed by Adam Barker-Mill) were the pre-forgotten. Respectable British Film Institute footnotes. The valiantly unnoticed waiting to be discovered by media-studies theorists. Platts-Mills came east to collaborate with